Online Marketing Blog

When Brian Solis asked me to do a review of Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, the book he and Deidre Breakenridge published earlier this year,  it didn’t take a second to say yes. Putting that decision into action took a little longer and it finally took some time on a plane to get it done.

I’ve known Brian Solis through our common industry involvement with social media and the Public Relations world for several years.  Brian is a thought leader not because he’s popular on the social web or because he’s the cool-guy host of the Tech Set parties, or even because of his successful PR business, board memberships with up and coming companies, keynote presentations or the popular blogs he publishes at briansolis.com and bub.blicio.us.

Albert Maruggi

Minnesota is home to one of the most vibrant social media communities in the country, with attendance at Social Media Breakfasts exceeding 300+ (more than NYC or San Francisco).

With all that local interest and talent, I thought I would do a few interviews with some of the Minneapolis social media set that I’ve come to know.

Albert Maruggi is a 30-year communications practitioner whose career spans journalist, public affairs adviser in national politics, global marketer for technology companies and founder of Provident Partners. Through PRSA & Media Relations conferences—as well as through hair-raising driving in the hills of San Francisco—I’ve had the chance to get to know Albert and his keen insight into the future of digital marketing and PR.

The transition from old to new technology creates both challenges and opportunities for communications professions.  The field of public relations is directly tied to the publishing industry which of course, is directly connected to business and consumer information discovery and consumption.  The migration from offline to online has left these industries in a state of flux and traditional PR becoming increasingly digital is no exception.

There are tactical challenges as well as strategic. For example, the shift towards digital communications means a new set of tools must be learned in order to accomplish today’s PR goals.  Now more than ever, public relations professionals need to familiarize themselves with a new arsenal of tools to adjust and thrive in a digital world.

Online Marketing Blog readers are well aware: news search engines offer a great way to receive targeted traffic related to breaking topics or to help with a public relations launch.

What are the latest ways businesses and media are using content to tap into the power of news search?  Mark Jackson, SEW Expert & President/CEO, VIZION Interactive moderates this group to dig deeper:

• Dana Todd, CMO, Newsforce
• Allison Fabella, SEO Manager, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
• Greg Jarboe, President & Co-Founder, SEO-PR
• Lisa Buyer, President & CEO, The Buyer Group
• David Radicke, Consultant, SEO, SEM, Web Analytics, Radicke eCommerce
• Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google

Mark led this session with a brief introduction of each speaker and quickly turned it over to let the panel members give their presentations.

image credit: Sergio Tudela via Flickr (cc 3.0)

A Creative Commons license is an simple way to encourage others to share, remix, and reuse your digital content. If you’re publishing material of any variety to the web and looking to have it spread, licensing your work under Creative Commons is smart as it actively encourages sharing with permission and attribution.

“Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.” –Tim Oriely

With the release of Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price there is a heated debate going around the web about the idea of free. I’m not going to get into the economics of free, but purely from a marketing perspective, free is the great equalizer. Especially when talking about digital content, talented producers can leapfrog gatekeepers and get noticed fast. Creative Commons was designed to work with what the web naturally does, and that’s share the best content freely without resistance.

How agile is your marketing?  Do you have layer upon layer of approval processes, committees, lawyers, and executives who need to sign off on every piece of external communication before it goes out?

If yes, your business is structured for a pre-Internet world, and unfortunately this means you will always be at a disadvantage compared to agile competitors designed to take advantage of a connected society.  An inescapable truth is the web rewards companies (and people) that are nimble.

People interact deepest with thoughts and ideas that have character and personality.  And if there is one thing that removes this, it is the superfluous layers that design by committee creates.  It rips the personality from content piece by piece as it passes though each filter, and is the antithesis of agility and what makes for compelling communications.

Over the next 2 weeks several staff from TopRank be hitting the road for multiple SEO/Social Media/PR speaking and training events. We invite you to attend and would love to meet up with readers of Online Marketing Blog.  

Topics during these events will emphasize the practice areas of our agency: Search Marketing, Online Public Relations and Social Media Marketing. Locations will range from New York to San Francisco to Minneapolis.

May 19: Media Relations Summit, Crowne Plaze Hotel in NYC (event info)

4:30 pm: Mastering SEO, Google AdWords and Other Search Tools to Increase Visibility
If you’re ready to vault your website, landing pages, corporate videos, blogs, press releases, and online newsroom into the top of the search rankings, take in this one-hour bootcamp. You’ll learn all the latest tools, tips and tricks for making Google and Yahoo love you.

Measuring the effect of online marketing and PR efforts is essential for both understanding the return on investment but also for feedback that will improve subsequent efforts.  

Measuring the effect of SEO for Public Relations benefits should start with well defined outcomes. To get a good handle on SEO effectiveness, it’s important to match the purpose for the effort with specific metrics.  For example, if improving brand visibility is a goal, then documenting brand mentions in connection with news & PR content at regular intervals can demonstrate the effect of content promotion and link building. 

Online PR metrics and tools often include:

• News wire service metrics (see screen capture below)
• Web analytics for landing pages and web site
• Google and Yahoo alerts

Changes in consumer preferences towards news consumption and sharing habits via the social web present both challenges and opportunities for PR agencies.  Searchers increasingly expect to interact with what they find via search. 

The opportunity for Public Relations is to understand that leveraging social media as a distribution channel to attract buzz and earn links is as important as keyword optimization of social media content to improve visibility on standard search engines.  Simply put: SEO and Social Media go together like peas and carrots.

The nature of the social web encourages participation: sharing, voting, commenting and linking. Popular social content gets exposure, traffic and can result in a substantial number of relevant inbound links.  Keyword relevancy plus aboundant inbound links to content equals improved search engine visibility. Whatever keywords that are used to describe optimized news content that becomes popular within social channels like news, bookmarking and media sharing are what that content will tend to rank highly on in standard search engines.

For those readers just joining us, this is post #8 in a series of 10 on the intersection of search engine optimization and public relations, “Top Ten SEO Tips for PR Professionals“.

Besides content optimization and making sure a site’s news pages and digital assets can be found and indexed, attracting relevant inbound links is the next most important tactic for improving search engine performance of Public Relations related content.

There are literally hundreds of ways to acquire good links. There are even more ways to acquire bad links, so knowing the difference can be important. Read more about that below. But first, we’ll describe some general guidelines for news content link building.

 Most web sites with active media relations programs host an online newsroom. Analysts, journalists and even some bloggers find newsrooms a useful resource for finding past media coverage, press releases, image assets, executive bios, company history, webinars, white papers, case studies and other information helpful for researching stories.

Any content that is published to the web can be optimzed for search and that includes online newsrooms. We prefer to implement online newsrooms with blog software, because of the content management features and inherent search engine benefifts. Automatic RSS feed creation is also a benefit.

Newsrooms should offer easy to find contact information as well as a content categorization scheme that considers keywords as part of the taxonomy. Organizing press releases by date isn’t very useful for searchers. Archiving press releases and other content within the newsroom by categories, chronologically as well as by keyword tag (as in folksonomy, not meta keyword tag) can be quite useful to readers as well as search engines.

One of the most popular keyword optimization content types for SEOs and Public Relations professionals alike are press releases. As a news communication tool, the value of press releases has undergone changes.  However, press releases provide a substantial amount of content to news search engines and can rank well in standard search engines like Google or Yahoo. 

Multiple studies have documented that consumers and journalists are searching for and reading press releases. Optimizing press releases for a specific audience makes them easier to find and therefore, more of an asset for communicating news and attracting traffic to the company web site.  As a result, it makes sense for marketing and PR practitioners alike to understand how to make press release content easier to find.